


wake up

by wwanderingproxy



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Compliant, Maybe - Freeform, lord english but like him as seperate souls and not as One Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 09:48:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12296622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wwanderingproxy/pseuds/wwanderingproxy
Summary: You find yourself reliving the worst moment of your life.





	wake up

**Author's Note:**

> fklajdfh there will never be enough "lord english as a group of teenage souls" content so here i am to give My Humble Contribution

Your name is Equius Zahhak, barely, and you stumble into awareness, struck with the violent feeling that something is _wrong wrong wrong_.

You’re disoriented, you always are as you ‘wake up,’ though that is probably the wrong term. It’s less like sleep and more like not existing, a dormant soul refusing to take part in it’s host body. You spend most of your time like that, and were it up to you, you would never come back.

Unfortunately for you, the host requires somebody to be awake, and that somebody seems to be you at the moment. It usually doesn’t happen; Hal and Caliborn both rarely rest, leaving you free to sleep as much as you want.

You don’t have much time to wonder why both of them have left before you register what’s happening through the puppet’s eyes, and _oh_. 

You- the other you, the you in your own body- are on your knees, blood welling in the wound on your leg, the barest hint of a grimace the only indicator of how badly it hurt.

Gamzee takes slow, lumbering steps towards you and you- You are stuck watching. The _wrong wrong wrong_ clicks into place suddenly, as you realize that you, the you in the puppet, are not supposed to be here. You try to dredge up your own memory of the event, but it’s obscured, manipulated by the new facts that are appearing before you. Still, you’re certain that the puppet was nowhere near you, and you feel. Ill.

Your gaze drifts up into the vent shaft, the dying memory of Nepeta bursting out of it floating to the front of your mind. She is not there yet, no yellow glowing eyes shine through the bars, and no glimmering blue claws peak over the edges.

No, the only blue is you, the blood caste you once let kill you. You remember the disgusting concoction of emotions in that moment- this moment- with the hindsight embarrassment of past mistakes, but this is so much more. The broken shades hide your eyes, and your mouth is set in trained impassivity, but the dusting of blue across your face reveals how you felt- feel- plenty. You can’t see Gamzee’s face from this angle, but you know he smirks here, looming over you. 

It feels like you’re still there, still living it, the terror and disgust and acceptance scrambling your thoughts and you hate it, you hate how stupid you were, you hate how much you _failed her_.

The string tangles itself around your neck and you almost feel it, feel the air cut off from your breathing sacs, but you neither need nor have either anymore.

It felt like an eternity, but here, from the outside, it was really only a few seconds. The gasp as your breathing sacs start to burn, shifting-crunching noise as your windpipe is broken, the thud as you hit the ground; they’re only seconds from each other. You want to reach out and hit your past self, grab his broken throat and shove him into a wall and kill him, kill him for being such a useless imbecilic casteist, so focused on his own standing that he let himself get killed, let his moirail get killed.

You don’t notice Nepeta until she’s halfway through the air.

You’re not working on your own memory anymore, the olive tears in her eyes unfamiliar. She doesn’t catch Gamzee by surprise, not by a long shot, and he catches her wrist with a sickening snap and a pained yelp. 

He uses her claws, digging deep scratches through his own face as she is held immobile, writhing and screeching. The moment her wrist is let go she strikes him deep and hard with the other, clawing straight through his shirt and likely his side.

Purple drips off her claws when she pulls back, and for a tense moment there is a battle. She swipes as his face again, but doesn’t succeed in knocking that easy smile off of it, Gamzee ducking and swinging his club. He misses as Nepeta turns a hard right, wincing as she uses her hurt arm to bound off the wall and throw herself at him, claws sinking deep into his abdomen. Again he swings, missing by a hair as Nepeta pulls down hard, raking flesh and cloth in strips from him, then trying to dive under him.

You watch in numb detachment as he flash steps backward, raising his club like a cuebat.

This time he doesn’t miss.

Nepeta barely has time to glance upward, and you are grateful you can’t see her expression as he swings hard, hitting her hard in the side of the head.

It happens too fast for you to register the details you want simultaneously want to commit to memory and wipe from your mind forever, but she goes flying hard into the wall with a painful thud. She stumbles, falling onto her back, one hand clinging to her head where she was hit.

Gamzee takes a slow step forward, hovering over her. The club is splashed with green, and when she pulls it away, so is her hand. She looks down at it, then back up to him.

There is no more fight. Nepeta is too dazed, the single arm holding her up has a shattered wrist, and she’s shaking like a leaf as Gamzee prods at her, almost too gently with the end of the club. A weak, confused noise that hurts your soul makes its way out of her, chest heaving with too much effort. She’s staring right at him and still doesn’t expect the next swing, right to the head once again. Instead of just throwing her into the wall, there’s a cracking noise that you nauseously realize is her skull caving.

She falls to the ground as Gamzee draws back his club. You have too clear of a view and it makes you dizzy, uncomfortable, Nepeta’s prone body inches from yours.

Gamzee looks towards you, the puppet, and gives a little chuckle, almost looking for approval. You wonder if he knows this puppet contains a shard of himself. You wonder if he knows this puppet contains you.

He doesn’t retrieve you from the ground. Instead, he says, _i’ll be back_ to the open air, in that infernal mumbling way he uses between the yelling, when he's sober. And then he’s gone.

You, of course, are stuck in a puppet. You cannot move. You can barely think.

You don’t know how long you stare at the dead bodies of your past for.

When Hal wakes up, you don’t quite realize it immediately. This is a feat in and of itself, considering Hal is not a subtle person in any aspect of the word.

He has mastered the art of shutting out whatever is happening outside the host body, through years of maintaining a dreamself and a waking self simultaneously, and his superior processing capability compared to the rest of you, so you know he is not aware of what is happening when he groggily calls out to you.

TT: Equius?  
TT: Dude?

You can almost visualize him, sleepily rolling out of a bed not unlike the ones on Derse, hair ruffled the same way Dirk’s did when he woke up. It’s a sight you’d all had much exposure to through the years of being with him on Earth, the way he would take painstakingly long hours to do it just right simply because there was nothing else to do. As it is, you are fixated on the corpses. 

TT: Dude.   
TT: Are you awake or am I just shitting myself here?  
TT: And by that I mean I know you’re awake because I don’t make mistakes.  
TT: So answer me.  
CT: D --> I am awake, my apologies  
TT: There you are.  
TT: Good to see you actually up for once, even if you sound like shit. I can only put up with their frothing, ravenous bullshit on my own for so long.  
TT: ..No? No quibble about how we’re literally souls and can’t hear each other?  
TT: Not even one?  
TT: Something’s happening up there, isn’t it. Goddamnit.

You don’t bother answering, as you know he’ll just look for himself. Even though you can’t actually sense when he tunes in, you know down to the moment anyway.

TT: Oh, oh shit.  
TT: Who the fuck died?  
TT: Wait, is that you?  
TT: Is her skull caved in?  
TT: Jesus christ.  
CT: D --> Yes  
CT: D --> To both  
CT: D --> Her name is Nepeta Lejion, and she was my moirail  
TT: Ah fuck.  
TT: Uh,  
TT: Are you okay?

You feel numb, empty down to your core. You feel sick with no outlet, just a trembling disconnection with the already tenuous bond you hold with the rest of the world. You feel like you’ve been strung up on a wire that someone’s plucking just to watch you suffer. 

You... You want to go back to sleep.

CT: D --> No

You let yourself fall back into the void.

**Author's Note:**

> i forgot that trolls dont have beds but im too lazy to fix it. equius has spent enough time as LE to use the term normally, ig.
> 
> im so tired


End file.
